Ampezzo Legends

Let your imagination take flight to discover the legends of the Pale Mountains.

EDELWEISS

When God made the world, he decided to cover it with flowers and plants.

He created flowers of every colour and perfume, and herbs with magical properties which he scattered everywhere. Fields and hills became like brightly coloured carpets, and the woods rustled with an outpouring of green.

Only the high mountains of the Alps remained bare and silent. Nothing could grow that high up, on the cold and naked rock. The mountains were saddened by this, and asked the heavens for help.

And one night, when the full moon shone, the angels came, gathering the stars in their hands and scattering them over the rocks, where they settled in the crevices. The mountains joyously wrapped each star in a soft down to shelter it from the cold, and offered it a little earth to cling to with its fragile roots. The moon, watching from the sky, was enchanted by the sight of all these stars in the mountains, and by bathing them with her light she turned their petals white.

At sunrise, the mountains were covered with white star-like shapes: the very first Stelle Alpine flowers, also known as edelweiss.

THE PALE MOUNTAINS

Once upon a time there was a Prince, whose father's kingdom lay in the Eastern Alps.

The kingdom was rich in green pastures, woodlands and towering rocky mountains, but the Prince was sad, tormented by his desire to travel to the Moon. One day the Prince was lost in a forest. He reached a plateau full of flowering rhododendrons, and fell asleep. He dreamt he was talking to a beautiful young woman who said her father was the King of the Moon.

When he awoke, he heard voices in the distance and he saw two old men, hidden by a cloud, at the top of a cliff. They introduced themselves as inhabitants of the Moon, and invited the Prince to accompany them to their home. And so the Prince travelled to the Moon, found the Princess of his dream, and married her.

After years of happiness on the Moon the Prince had to return to Earth, with his beautiful wife, where they passed many more years of happiness. But then the Princess became inconsolably sad, and had to return to the Moon in order to save her life.

Desolate, the Prince withdrew from life, but in a cave he met the King of the Salvani, a race of dwarves who lived in caves and dark forests. He made a pact with this King. The dwarves would turn moonlight into thread, so that they could clothe the mountains of the Kingdom entirely with the light of the Moon. In return, the Salvani people would be granted a mountain territory of their own. And so the Prince was able to bring his wife back to Earth, to live in the Pale Moonlight Mountains, and the Dwarfs gained a new kingdom. Today the Pale Mountains are called the Dolomites, and the Salvani still live in its caves and forests.

Freely inspired by "I Monti Pallidi" by Carlo Felice Wolf

ENROSADIRA

The "enrosadira", the characteristic pink-orange tint of the Dolomite peaks at sunset, is of course also the subject of a legend.

Once upon a time, the mountain tops were covered with flowers and inhabited by gnomes.

One day the ruler of this kingdom was captured and imprisoned. The splendour of the beautiful flowers covering the mountain tops had caught the attention of the enemy.

The king thus threw a spell on the mountain, transforming all the flowers into rock, so that they could no longer be seen by day or by night.

He did however, forget about the twilight, and thus it is that still to this day at dawn and at sunset one can admire the red tinges of that enchanted flower garden.